What you've got here are King Oliver's final recordings as a leader. Big bands were still figuring themselves out in 1930, moving from one decade's definitive flavor into another stylistic space as yet unspecified. Hovering over everything was the gruesome specter of fiscal disaster. This did strange things to the music business. Pop culture became partly mummified by a creeping sentimentality that would emerge again during the age of Cold War conformity. During the 1930s and the 1950s jazz endured and continued to evolve, ...
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What you've got here are King Oliver's final recordings as a leader. Big bands were still figuring themselves out in 1930, moving from one decade's definitive flavor into another stylistic space as yet unspecified. Hovering over everything was the gruesome specter of fiscal disaster. This did strange things to the music business. Pop culture became partly mummified by a creeping sentimentality that would emerge again during the age of Cold War conformity. During the 1930s and the 1950s jazz endured and continued to evolve, as it always will under any circumstances. With his best decade behind him, King Oliver presided over an orchestra that occasionally sounds a bit sleepy. During their best moments, these guys are almost as solid as Bennie Moten's band, or maybe the Moten orchestra of 1927. "Mule Face Blues" and "Stingaree" are features for Henry "Red" Allen. "Boogie Woogie" is a high-potency stomp containing not one speck of the definitive eight-to-the-bar formula usually associated with the term. On "Stop Crying," Buster Bailey blows into his clarinet with unusual ferocity and Ward Pinkett launches into a frantic scat vocal. Speaking of singers, if you're going to listen back on music from around 1930, it is necessary to make concessions to notions of popular taste. Otherwise, you'll be operating with no historical context whatsoever. If you think George Bias was a silly vocalist, check out some of the singing on records from the same time period by Fats Waller & His Buddies or Duke Ellington. Not everybody is going to sound as hip as Frankie "Half-Pint" Jaxon or Baby Cox. When three members of the band formed a vocal trio and sang on some of the recordings made in 1931, the results were entertaining in ways that maybe we ought to allow ourselves to rediscover. It's a shame that King Oliver's recordings taper off at this point. Like most other bands on the scene at that time, this one could have picked up steam again as new players, composers and arrangers would have helped it adapt to changing times. By the end of the 1930s, Eddie Condon or the guys at the Library of Congress could have rekindled popular interest in Joe Oliver. Even if by then he'd given up blowing his horn he could have succeeded as nominal leader of a New Orleans-styled jazz band, or something more modern-sounding. But this is pure speculation. Papa Joe died in abject poverty in Savannah, Georgia on the 10th of April, 1938. With five volumes of his work available from Classics, there's a lot of King Oliver to explore, and it's all worth your while. ~ arwulf arwulf, Rovi
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